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Whether you are new to XtremIO or a community expert, this guide is for you! With the introduction of 4.0 code, the EMC XtremIO team introduced a new concept to manage your inventory called tagging. For those with prior 4.0 code experience, this new tagging feature replaces the folders for management concept and provides for more robust inventory management and reporting.

I worked with a customer recently who has well over 200+ volumes that were not tagged or grouped in any way. The ask of me was, how do they tag in bulk via CLI to accomplish this? This is fairly easy, but it does require a bit of trial and error as the XtremIO CLI does not provide code syntax examples as you may be familiar with on the VNX or other EMC storage arrays.

First, we need to define what we want to tag (volumes, initiator groups, etc.) Next, we see how the CLI structure/syntax is for tagging by simply issuing the create-tag command.

Next, we need to see how do we declare a volume tag or an initiator group tag as the above shows us that the tag “entity” is a string value. To show you this, I did not complete the command and I used an incorrect string value of “volumes”.

Now, we are cooking with gas and have something work with here. I want to create a nested volume tag that is something like this: VMware ESXi Hosts > Production Cluster

The nested volume tag will help me to filter based on my VMware hosts to see all hosts and also I can group them by their VMware cluster name as well. The environment I am managing is a mixture of VMware ESXi, RHEL, and AIX so this nested tag is extremely helpful with this. Now, let’s create our tag.

Now, I am ready to tag my volumes in bulk. I took a show-volumes dump from the XtremIO CLI, saved it to a text file, and imported it into Excel as text data fixed width. Using the volumes column and some Excel CONCATENATE magic, I have my script ready to tag all my volumes in bulk.